G75 Media website now HTTPS

Safe as houses – greater security for G75 Media clients

The G75 Media website has recently gained HTTPS accreditation, protecting site visitors against malicious activity while they’re on our site. After ten years using the standard HTTP protocol, last week’s upgrade reflects our commitment to ensuring everyone can browse our portfolio of published articles (or submit an enquiry about our copywriting services) in complete safety.

HTTPS websites encrypt information before it’s transmitted to the web browsers of individual visitors. This ensures any traffic between our server and the device you’re reading this on is protected against eavesdroppers and cyber-criminals. You’ll often see HTTPS preceding retail or ecommerce web addresses, where financial data is being exchanged and eavesdroppers would have a field day.

Even though our content production and copywriting services are highly celebrated, online criminals probably wouldn’t try to exploit your visit to our site today. Or would they? After all, the G75 Media website was created using the world’s most popular content management platform. Its sheer popularity makes WordPress a favoured target for spam and malware developers. WordPress software plugins are also susceptible to newly-launched malware – known as zero day attacks.

As part of the EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation, G75 Media has to meet strict standards regarding the storage and management of client data. Elevating our website to HTTPS standard demonstrates our commitment to this process. It also places us ahead of many other content production agencies and media firms, who also lack our extensive client roster. A number of our copywriting agency rivals are still using HTTP, resulting in “Not secure” tabs appearing in Chrome or warning messages flashing up in Firefox. We take your safety a little more seriously.

If you already understand the principles of zero day attacks and end-to-end encryption, you might want to get in touch regarding our technical writing and technology journalism services. But don’t worry if we lost you after “standard protocol”. We’ve got everything secured.

G75 Media and GDPR – keeping your data safe

Later this month, the EU will roll out its General Data Protection Regulation. After four years of development, GDPR will effectively replace the UK’s 1988 Data Protection Act. As such, it will place additional regulatory burdens on companies retaining any client information on file. This can range from the names and email addresses of corporate contacts to bank account details and social media posts.

At G75 Media, we take these responsibilities very seriously. We are preparing for GDPR’s introduction on Monday the 25th, and these are some of the steps we’re introducing to protect and preserve the confidentiality of client data:

• From today, every email we send will contain an invitation to unsubscribe from future correspondence. If you reply with the word ‘unsubscribe’ in the subject line, we will immediately delete any contact information we hold relating to you.

• If six months has elapsed since we last worked with you, we will archive any sent or received electronic documentation. Data will be saved on a password-protected USB key with AES 256-bit encryption, which is stored offline in a safe.

• Current documentation and related client data (including email addresses) is stored on a password-protected drive of a desktop computer equipped with sophisticated antivirus software. We do not share client data with anyone, in any circumstances.

• Any historic databases or spreadsheets of contact information we previously held have all been deleted. This ensures any information provided to us by former clients has been securely destroyed.

• If you contact us via telephone, email, post, text message or social media, we will only communicate with you regarding work-related briefs or assignments. We will never send you marketing emails, event invitations or other unsolicited sales missives.

• We’re working towards a paperless office, and we never print out emailed documentation. Any paperwork we do receive is securely stored in a locked building until it’s no longer needed, at which point it’s destroyed in a cross-cut shredder.

We recognise there is a great deal of confusion about GDPR and its effect on small businesses around the UK. As technology bloggers, we have already been commissioned to produce a number of features on GDPR and its impact, so it’s a subject we’re familiar with. However, if you have any concerns about how we use or store client data, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Finally, if you’ve found this page while searching for information on GDPR, G75 Media has produced a number of practical guides on behalf of clients on both sides of the Atlantic. If you’d like content creating for your own company, we’ll be happy to provide you with a quote – in strict confidence, and with full adherence to GDPR regulations! You can get in touch with us here.

Easter break? Not for us!

While the rest of the UK enjoys a welcome (if rather chilly) Easter bank holiday weekend, work continues at the copywriting coalface for G75 Media. In our new role as copy editors of a national magazine, there are articles to be revised and proofread in preparation for next week. We have the usual turntable of weekly deadlines to be met – even if copy that our clients would normally upload on Monday won’t be seen til Tuesday! And there’s also the small matter of entering a national competition for freelancers, with our entry ready to be uploaded. If we’re nominated, you’ll hear about it here first…

Consumer advice? All in a day’s work…

After a thoroughly enjoyable break over Christmas, G75 Media has returned to a packed inbox and a busy schedule. Our first January job involves producing consumer advice articles for one of the UK’s leading price comparison firms. We’re currently writing four features a week for this client, providing practical advice about mobile phone contracts, broadband accounts and on-demand services.

We work with IT and computing firms on both sides of the Atlantic, writing everything from keyword-driven blogs to in-depth white papers and infographics. G75 Media’s founder Neil Cumins grew up in a family of amateur programmers and created his own art package in BASIC at the tender age of 13, so computing has always been an area of personal expertise. By researching topics like website hosting, WordPress and cybersecurity on a weekly basis, creating original content on these subjects has become as intuitive as writing about games consoles or streaming media services.

If you need any assistance with technology writing, consumer advice journalism or any other form of digital media content, get in touch with G75 Media for a quote. Wherever you are in the world, we’ll be able to find the right words for your products and services.

Ten years of copywriting excellence

Ten years ago today, G75 Media Ltd was officially incorporated under the Companies Act 1985, becoming Scotland’s newest media company. And without wishing to lapse into cliché, the intervening decade has been quite a journey…

 

G75 Media was founded by Neil Cumins with a three-figure budget. It was based in the spare room of a house in East Kilbride, where an antiquated PC perched on a second-hand dressing table. There was no website, no income and no budget for advertising, and work had to be fitted around Neil’s day job as a property journalist.

 

Little did anyone know on that chilly November day that the global economy was about to enter the most protracted recession for a century. Setting up a new media company in the midst of the Northern Rock bailout (and an unexpected decline in British house prices) was clearly not a ideal for a property-based copywriting agency. Throughout our first five years, clients regularly went out of business and new custom was often frustratingly hard to acquire.

 

Nevertheless, G75 Media has survived – and even thrived. We’ve worked with clients on four continents. We’ve become experts in industries as diverse as optometry, tourism, computer networks and mental health blogging. And Neil’s contacts throughout the housing and automotive industries have ensured a steady flow of motoring journalism and property writing, for local and national media clients.

 

While it’s tempting to make predictions about the future, the last ten years has demonstrated how events can change a media company’s direction. G75 Media was named after a postcode in our home town of East Kilbride, and intended to serve local businesses, yet most of our copywriting clients are based in England. While our plans to offer services to ex-pats in the United Arab Emirates didn’t bear fruit, we regularly work with high-profile companies in America and Australia. And we certainly didn’t expect our white label copywriting services to be as sought after as they have been, with constant demand for technology blogs and brochure/website content.

 

Here’s to ten years of copywriting excellence. And if you’d like to join us for the next leg of our journey, why not get in touch to see how we can help with journalism or content production?

Copywriting without borders

It’s almost a decade since G75 Media was founded, with the intention of creating written communications and copywriting for businesses across Scotland. The dream of providing a local service for local people inspired our name, our business plan and our website content. Yet the company hasn’t evolved in the way we originally imagined…

Although we have several regular clients in central Scotland, G75 Media’s content production services have been utilised by companies in locations as diverse as France, the West Indies and Ireland. In the early hours of this morning, we received a new commission from an occasional client in Australia. The brief is to write an opinion piece about effective office design, for a leading Asian Pacific recruitment company.

East Kilbride and Melbourne are over 10,000 miles apart, but effective copywriting knows no borders. We’ll write in Australian English and invoice in Australian dollars, putting ten years of international property journalism and technology writing to good use. This particular article is being produced on a white label basis, so Antipodean readers will have no idea it was written half a world away from the sun-baked banks of Albert Park Lake.

Being able to write in different dialects has become an unexpectedly important aspect of our business, with two clients in America requiring weekly technology content in American English. That involves liberal use of the letter ‘z’ instead of the letter ‘s’, and different terminology – sidewalk rather than pavement, turn signal rather than indicator, and so on. Despite being fairly useless at impersonating American accents, we’re becoming highly adept at writing in a recognisably (or recognizably) Stateside manner.

Whether you’re reading this article in New York, New Delhi or New Zealand, G75 Media can produce cost-effective copywriting and journalism that’ll sound like it was written by a native. Your audience will never know that their content was created under cloudy South Lanarkshire skies. Contact us to find out how we can help you, wherever you are in the world…

Driving up standards among freelance writers

In our last news story, we explained why two days are rarely the same for freelance writers. And to demonstrate this point, yesterday saw G75 Media’s founder Neil Cumins visiting the Brooklands motor racing venue in Surrey, for a rather special assignment…

Neil was invited to this iconic location by a leading motoring publication, to preview a forthcoming model from Mercedes-Benz. As a long-standing motoring journalist and former motor trade marketing executive, the invitation was too tempting to refuse. Neil’s findings will be published in a few weeks’ time, as part of a special feature by What Car? magazine.

It’s always nice to spend a day as a guest of the media, rather than as a host. However, the cycle of deadlines and assignments familiar to freelance writers has now resumed in earnest. As the Motoring page of this site outlines, G75 Media is ideally placed to produce dynamic motoring journalism – as well as helping other people to create their own automotive content.

A day in the life of a copywriter

One of the greatest joys of being a freelance copywriter is that no two days are the same. You might pour the morning’s first cup of coffee with the intention of writing a particular article, before a completely different journalism feature takes priority. It’s easy to find yourself juggling half a dozen copywriting assignments over the course of a day, particularly when you factor in emails and phone calls.

While G75 Media preserves the confidentiality of our copywriting clients, it’s no secret that we work across several unrelated industries. Yesterday, for instance, we produced editorial content for four companies in very different sectors:

  • A national property magazine
  • An international web hosting company
  • An Edinburgh-based social media startup
  • A UK-wide group of opticians.

Optometry isn’t listed on the What We Do page of this site, but we’ve specialised in optometry content production since 2009. We regularly accept copywriter roles on behalf of app developers and software startups, too. Some of these home-grown tech firms have gone on to become well-known brands.

You might think juggling copywriting projects for several accounts would be confusing, but it’s actually liberating. It’s human nature to switch between tasks, and few of us are suited to doing one thing for hours on end. Moving between topics and industries over the course of a day keeps a copywriter’s mind alert and focused. By contrast, spending eight or nine hours working on a single editorial article usually leads to fatigue. And with more copywriting clients on G75 Media’s books than we’ve ever had before, our working days are likely to remain richly varied and unpredictable…

Stable copywriting relationships

G75 Media recently said goodbye to our second-oldest client, after working together for fourteen years. The average British marriage only lasts twelve years, so we’re very proud to have provided our industry-leading copywriting services for so long. This account has also given us unprecedented exposure to the residential property market, allowing us to provide property journalism services across the UK. You can read about our property industry expertise here.

Our client’s new management team undertook cost-cutting measures that meant the budget for G75 Media’s freelance copywriting services no longer existed. However, we’re always looking for ways to optimise value for money on behalf of our clients. We provide detailed quotes for one-off content production jobs, and we won’t charge a penny until work has been completed. Long-term accounts are billed monthly in arrears, at pre-agreed rates.

Whether you’re looking for a single copywriting project or a long-term partnership, G75 Media is here to help – for as long as you need us.

Something old, something new

As we start the countdown to G75 Media’s tenth anniversary in November, it’s an appropriate time to unveil a brand new website that showcases everything we’ve achieved since 2007. Designed in association with the experts at AIMS Media, this thoroughly modern masterpiece is packed with useful information about who we are and what we do. Industry-specific pages outline our expertise in property writing and motoring journalism, as well as demonstrating our peerless track record of supporting technology and travel clients throughout the UK – and beyond.

We’ve taken this opportunity to show off some of our recent editorial projects, and you can even learn about our former copywriting clients for the first time. We’re keen to celebrate the global brands and blue-chip companies we’ve assisted with content production in the past, while protecting the confidentiality of our existing client base. A number of these working relationships date back to G75 Media’s launch almost a decade ago, and we’re rightly proud of the partnerships that we continue to develop and strengthen on a daily basis.

Let us know your thoughts about the new G75 Media site, via our Contact page. We’d love to hear from you.